Teacher Discussion Forums

You'll need to plough through this at some point (but I think it's a good paper, and therefore worth it):
http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/cv/replace_conc.htm

Sorry about its length (and the length of this post too!). You should perhaps just skip down to the highlighted section (between vvv and ^^^ symbols) below in this post! The main question I want to ask everyone is to be found there, anyway (that is, everything before the vvv/^^^ bit is just "for your information", just a summary of the less contentious parts of Cobb's paper with a few additional comments from me).

Summary: After the opening preamble for his paper (entitled 'Do corpus-based electronic dictionaries replace concordancers?' - incidentally, he is talking about online, free versions of learner dictionaries, not versions on CD ROM or in pocket-sized machines), Cobb asks four questions before reaching his conclusions.

The answer to the first ('What is the quantity of examples in an online entry?') is obviously going to be 'Much less than a concordancer', with the equally obvious corollary that there will be more waiting for an 'enterprising learner...to discover' than can be fitted into a dictionary (I haven't checked though to see if the findings he points out in relation to collocates of the complain word family are in fact 'vague or absent even from a good dictionary', especially a paper version). His fourth question is pretty much a refinement of the thrust of his first.

The main thing of interest to me in his answer to his first question were his comments about the relative merits of each of the then* available online dictionaries. Cobb initially (in this section of his paper) compares the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 3rd Web edition with two substantially smaller learner ones (the Cambridge Learner's and Collins COBUILD Student's Dictionary Online [CCSD Online]) - no prizes for guessing which of these emerges as the best.

However, Cobb then goes on to point out the advantages and flexibility of concordances over dictionaries in answering his third question ('How accessible are the examples in an online dictionary?'), and in doing so, leads into a short discussion of the superiority of Cambridge's advanced learner dictionaries (the CIDE, and now the CALD) for his purposes (providing students with/directing them, as homework or correction of other homework, to the exact information - "tailored feedback" - that they need, in the form of specific subentry/submeaning URLs, rather than links which in the case of the LDOCE 'have to be an entire page', that is, a whole dictionary entry with all its potential subsenses):

Unfortunately, all three of the dictionaries under investigation would be quite poor for the purpose of giving learners highly specific examples, because their pages can only be accessed whole and not via particular examples or any other page components. Suppose a learner had written, "He complained about he was never allowed to speak*," and his or her document was returned with the error marked and a link to the LDOCE entry in Figure 3. The link would have to be to the entire page, since the individual pieces of information (even complain, complain about, complain that) cannot be accessed separately. Which part of the entry is the learner supposed to look at?

None of the three dictionaries have separate URLs leading to complain about or any other piece within the entry, i.e. they do not allow targeting of specific lexical or grammatical information. Searching for complain about will either generate an error, or else lead to the general entry for the first word. A concordance, of course, can target very specific information, whether of several words, or parts of words, or either separated by still other words. The dictionary pages are precast wholes, while concordance pages are constructed dynamically, from small pieces, on demand. But is this dictionary limitation one of principle or just of current technology?

.....

A recent addition to the Cambridge online series offers greater accessibility than any of the three dictionaries we have focused on hitherto, as well as greater exploitation of the Internet medium. This dictionary, the Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE, 2002), is not strictly classified as a learner dictionary, but it has much in common with the Longman LDOCE including the within-entry hyperlink (click any word inside the entry and you are led to that word's definition), and this technology will no doubt be re-used in the long awaited Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary. The CIDE has structured its information in far smaller pieces than any other online dictionary, and it has given the pieces their own URLs. The prospects for finer-grained access may be good.

As can be seen on the left side of Figure 6, the main CIDE entry for love (to take a fresh example) asks the enquirer to refine his or her search into one of three directions (love somebody, love something, and love as a tennis score). The main entry is accessed via a URL of the usual kind (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/cmd_sea ... hword=love), and each separate sense has its own URL (e.g., love something is via http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=love*2+0), as do each of several multi-word units involving the term (love triangle, labour of love, and 18 others). In all, the entry has been broken into 23 separate Web pages all with their own URLs. All of these can be fairly easily found, copied, and embedded into a learner's text to provide information about a revision. For example, the learner who writes he is "in love with ice-cream" could be sent to the like something sub-page for reasonably specific help with a revision.

Cobb's observations still hold true even though Longman now have the 4th edition of the LDOCE Web version up and running. The Cambridge dictionaries provide URLs, whilst with the Longman, you are confined to jumping around in a pop up box sans address box (actually, although Cobb says - see above quote - of the LDOCE that 'Suppose a learner had written, "He complained about he was never allowed to speak*," and his or her document was returned with the error marked and a link to the LDOCE entry in Figure 3. The link would have to be to the entire page, since the individual pieces of information', how would one even supply the link to the entry beyond the Web dictionary homepage when there is no address box to copy it from? Come on, you PC whizzkids, or do learners just have to manually type in each word and wade through potentially long entries?). Also, there are a host of other dictionaries available to also browse on the Cambridge website. One thing, however, that the Longman does provide is frequency information in both "speech" and "writing" (relative to the size of the corresponding corpora); both dictionaries seem to be "interactive" to similar degrees (e.g. you can click on any word you don't know to be automatically directed to the relevant entry).

(No mention of the Oxford (OALDCE6), but then it wasn't available then. In a nutshell, it is also a pop-up window type, and it doesn't even have that "click away with the mouse" function...a bog-standard LDOCE, in other words).


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The most interesting part of Cobb's paper must, however, be the answer to his second question ('What is the quality of examples in a learner dictionary?'). I can understand him saying that meaning shouldn't be 'made too evident', that language often passes learner completely by (if it is all very clear and contextualized), but it seems counterintuitive to suggest that a learner's first encounter with a word should be (made) a difficult one, the word a rarer form of the lemma in an only sparsely clued context, and even if it makes total sense to you, would your learners appreciate you adopting this sort of approach? (I for one can see it leading into blissful infrequent oblivion at least).

What do you guys think? Any comments? I was imagining that browsing dictionaries would be a great way to learn words in very adequate (authentic, not too contrived nor too uncontrolled contexts/example sentences), surrounded by a lot of supporting information, but it seems I was wrong - when Cobb says 'What learners find in their learner dictionaries is, of course, a small number of very clear examples', he means it to be damming.

But of course, if, as Cobb concludes, 'the ideal electronic resource for language learning...a blend of dictionary and concordance' is developed as hoped and expected, students will have the best of both worlds available to them at the puch of a button.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Just a few comments on his 2001 study: If you look at words in the most and least learned categories that have the same number of occurences e.g. 2: sow vs. oars and sheep, or 4: plow vs. drew, are the differences in the mean 'Contextual Support Rating' that high? (I'm not a statistician and its been a while since read anything even remotely technical, so I'm not quite sure how to interpret the s.d. - standard deviation, right?). The thing that seems really obvious is just the raw frequency, the number of times the words were met. It seems a leap to go on from this study to imply that it is the mix of context support levels (i.e. less optimal contextual support), rather than frequency (or, for that matter, clarity) that is the deciding factor in retention.

That being said, I have said at least once elsewhere on Dave's that:

I'd actually be more interested in hearing how you would propose the most frequent 2000-3000 words or so be taught, because they do not form a simple, basic and discrete orderly list of items to be ticked off one by one, but reoccur and recombine much like DNA to produce a wonderful and complex myriad of linguistic forms. In contrast, the more advanced (i.e. less frequent) words are probably easier to acquire simply by virtue of being so much more distinct (they "stand out" more); and they may ultimately only be understandable not so much from context but more by paraphrase (definition) using the more basic words.
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 3131#13131
(The 'An argument for reading in the target language' thread started by Atreju( ))

Still, all I really said there was that less frequent words might be more "distinctive" or memorable meaning if not context-wise, and who's believes that so-called easy words in boring old everyday contexts don't constitute a major challenge and don't just pass learners by without incident or, for that matter, the occassional appreciation?

Hmm, I guess we need to distinguish between the complexities involved in both speech and writing, and understand in more depth exactly how they differ or are similar, and to what extent vocabulary might cross over from one to the other (and in the process be transformed). It's a dinstinction I didn't make clearly enough in the above quote, and one which Cobb himself doesn't either (perhaps we are just to assume from him quoting mainly SL reading studies 'that show that when new words are easy to interpret in fully redundant or "pregnant" contexts, they are often not noticed let alone retained' that he sees the challenge and acquisition opportunities as more lying in written texts, printed or electronic, than speech (but obviously, speech can be transcribed),whereas I tend to always be prioritizing on strenthening speech, to form a stronger basis for literacy, and in turn assured and perhaps as a consequence faster reading and writing development.

*The Cambridge Learner's has been superceded by the International and now Advanced versions, although it is still also one of those available at Cambridge's website; and the CCSD Online still seems to be unavailable through the university link I tried (due to server overdemand/overuse).

I decided to post all the above on the Bilingual forum's 'Best dictionaries for learners-opinions & REVIEWS' thread also (it seemed an appropriate place for it...but it wouldn't attract as much attention or possible comment there!).

Here's how I prefaced the duplicated post there (it might help summarize the above, looong post):

(I used this post to kick off a thread that I entitled The right kind of example. Cobblers? Or, 'Cobblers!' over on the AL forum a short while ago. I thought it would be appropriate to post it here too, though, because it concerns what most people surely consider to be one of the main advantages and strengths of learner dictionaries: their carefully chosen examples. In his paper at the link immediately below, Cobb seems to be saying that the choice of examples is not only too limited, but too careful and considered too, and he makes an interesting if slightly odd/counterintuitive argument in support of having more (in terms not only of quantity but also "quality") "less well-contextualized" examples. For any newbies here on Dave's, if you've got this far in this 'best dictionaries' thread, and also now find what Cobb says intriguing or even just plain silly and feel like responding, it's probably best to post your answers on the AL forum thread, because you'll get much more of a response there ).

Wow, this is like holding up a mirror in front of a mirror and seeing a tunnel of ever smaller "reflections" within each one!

The main problems to me with Cobb's corpus-driven approach are:

1) By simply "dumping" information* onto students, the teacher could be viewed as not doing as much as they could to actually teach.

2) The onus is therefore obviously on the student, and as Cobb admits, not all of them are up to the task ('There is lots of extra information buried in these lines...for the learner who knows how to dig it out'(my emphasis)). Cobb does not offer detailed guidelines of the sort of training such students would need in order to be in any position or at any level to consistently reach the same (sound) conclusions as native users of concordancers, other than say they will be up to the task once they reach a certain level of language proficiency, which leads me onto:

3) Aside from the technical skills, what level of linguistic proficiency would be enough for students to be absolutely confident in any inferences they were making? (There is always this "chicken and egg" problem when it comes to understanding/being expected to be able to understand prior to explicit study - that is, can top-down approaches, guessing from context, ultimately compensate for or replace less ambitious but perhaps more effective bottom-up approaches?). It rather begs the question, will those who can easily extract information from corpora and benefit from such study actually need to study concordances in the first place!? I sometimes think enough English is, well, enough, adequate for most purposes (other than becoming an expert linguist or academic in your chosen native language)!

4) Turning the situation around, how many native English teachers wouldn't themselves feel daunted if they were invited and expected to use concordances to themselves study a foreign language? Most of us would be wary of using even monolingual/native-user foreign language printed dictionaries (as Folse points out, 'After more than two decades of learning foreign languages, I do not own a single monolingual dictionary'; many other teachers are the same, he notes, but quite a few of them still insist on 'making strong statements about dictionary use when they themselves do not follow [their own] advice' - see the 'Best dictionaries for learners-opinions & REVIEWS' sticky thread at the top of the Bilingual Education forum). I suspect that learners ultimately prefer to be taught explicitly, and often don't mind being told things, or at least having their theories confirmed by a teacher and human interaction rather than by a machine.

5) The "tailored feedback" or guidance that Cobb seems to be envisaging assumes that all students will have access to the internet and submit homework in an electronic format, and that teachers will have the time to find, compose and send out links to students (the total number of links could easily run into the dozens each time). The logistics and time involved would be daunting for the teacher (Cobb offers "hope" by saying a teacher could 'speed the process further by building...a catalogue of such URL's for recurring error patterns'); traditional pen, paper, textbook and dictionary methods would almost certainly involve less taxing co-ordinating and fine-tuning, would probably be almost if not just as effective.

6) Talking of dictionaries, Cobb makes little mention of the other information that dictionaries provide, particularly their definitions (all he says at the very beginning of his paper is, 'It is universally acknowledged that language learning proceeds by examples. Learners need to meet and process many, many examples of the words and the structures of the language they are learning. There is an argument that they also need to meet explanations, but at present the evidence seems to favour examples'). I believe, however, that learners might need to and indeed often do reformulate newer and usually increasingly more complex items in terms of older, more basic ones that they are more familiar with and feel they understand (of course, as they use the newer forms more, they will come to understand them too and hopefully get a better understanding of why (the) two forms are necessary, and how they can stand in a tension and mutual opposition to each other despite their apparent "synonomy". Hope that didn't sound too structuralist for anyone). That isn't to say that this process is always a helpful or unconfusing one, but it seems unavoidable and is actually quite natural (as translation into, and sometimes "thinking from" the L1 is also), and who ever said getting these things straight in your mind wouldn't take some effort! Basically, I fear there might be a tendancy to press ever onward with all the data that is becoming available, when some more time spent "entering the door more deeply" might be time just as well spent (I've said before how most courses do not explore the basic spoken lexicogrammar in enough detail).

*Some might see it as making a plentiful bounty of it available.

Thanks, Fluff, for bringing this up. Cobb's paper appears, from my first glance through it, to be quite an excellent paper. The concordance generator from the HK Polytechnic University, is definitely good. I've printed out the paper, and intend to go through it with some care. Good show!:)

Larry Latham

Yeah, it is certainly an interesting paper!

Incidentally, I just want to assure everyone that despite the lengths at which I've prattled on above, I am definitely not dismissing what Cobb says out of hand, in fact, I am trying to fully understand and appreciate what he's saying, and could well end up using or being influenced by his ideas, if I can just get my "mindset" fully around them. I suspect I am not the only teacher who might feel some at least initial resistance, teachers do after all only want to "help" to the utmost of their abilities...but maybe (as Cobb is implying) we have to at some point relinquish control and let the language itself guide the students as they set off on their own voyages of discovery. I'm just interested in the processes and stages by which we might come to feel that it is time for the students to make that voyage - how can we know they are ready? If it's the hobbits and not Gandalf who's getting on the boat they'd better have enough provisions on board and a clear sense of the direction they (should be?) heading in!

.but maybe (as Cobb is implying) we have to at some point relinquish control and let the language itself guide the students as they set off on their own voyages of discovery.

If only..., if only..., ...it could be so. This would be perfection. Unattainable, perhaps, but a wonderful goal nonetheless.

I'm just interested in the processes and stages by which we might come to feel that it is time for the students to make that voyage - how can we know they are ready? If it's the hobbits and not Gandalf who's getting on the boat they'd better have enough provisions on board and a clear sense of the direction they (should be?) heading in!

Why, for heaven's sake! Don't you trust them? What about what you said recently elsewhere on this forum? Do you really expect that they have to be able to get directly to the target with no false starts? What about the idea of knowledge being provisional? What terrible thing will happen if they make mistakes? Aaaaaaiiiiiiieeeeee!!! Mistakes!!! Omigod, they'll drown in them for sure!

Check out this article:

http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-05/cover/

I know it's supposed to be about something different than language, but notice how evolution works. With no direction, things seem to get somewhere useful, even if it's not exactly where you (as teacher) might have thought you wanted your students to go. Is that bad?

Larry Latham

An "evolutionary" history of how ELT has "progressed":

Methodological madness*
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The Communicative Approach - Functional, social language
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"Communicative" activities**
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The Lexical Approach - Expanding the communicative syllabus
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Data-driven "learning"***

KEY:
vvv-HAD to lead into a consideration of how things could be
vvv improved

vvv-unfortunately, only lead to

* Teacher not thinking, just doing

** The scare quotes speak for themselves. See also: *

***If the teacher was the one looking at the data, rather than having a cuppa while the students waited for the IT technician to come fix the PC, some activities and that wonderful symbiosis known as "teaching/learning" might develop

Sarcasm aside, I'm just trying to point out that every great idea or movement that comes along is not fully exploited: that is, it is exploited mainly with regard for how it can be "sold" to the student. Most teachers don't take much of an interest, or do so with a view to how it can make their job (so-called teaching) easier.

Maybe I'm missing the point half the time, but how much learning does the average teacher really engage themself+ in beyond getting nicely acquainted with the buzzwords, just the "theory" on top of (not "behind", driving) and papering over the "practice" (of research, reflection, activity and syllabus design, curriculum evaluation, methodological improvement etc etc)? Still, perhaps it is not the average teacher's job to do most of or any of this stuff...but then, I am bound to ask, whose job is it? Who is doing it for us? The students?! Is that a good way to treat paying customers expecting "the best"?!

+Is that (themself) a word? Should I just use 'themselves' here? Latter sounds a bit strange...but former is formally wierd-looking!

Yes, basically, I reckon there has been a dearth of genuinely communicative activities all the way through "applied" linguistic history; any insights into the nature of language have soon been lost in the application of "the" (definite?) linguistics (linguistic "insights" at best, rather than cold hard facts?).

I suppose part of the problem is that many insights or theories are only halfway there in practical terms themselves e.g. The Lexical Approach. Reference is made to references, and one can see far from the shoulders of the giants, but that promised land is actually a good day's hike away at least!.

Maybe I'm missing the point half the time, but how much learning does the average teacher really engage themself+ in beyond getting nicely acquainted with the buzzwords, just the "theory" on top of (not "behind", driving) and papering over the "practice" (of research, reflection, activity and syllabus design, curriculum evaluation, methodological improvement etc etc)? Still, perhaps it is not the average teacher's job to do most of or any of this stuff...but then, I am bound to ask, whose job is it?

I am afraid you have quite a good point here, Fluffy. I know I have a tendency to be idealistic rather than realistic about classrooms and what or how they could be like. But no matter how much I and some others might want it, whatever it is will have to be managed by the "average teacher", and as you so rightly point out, such teachers will not be deeply engaged in grammatical nuances or theories of language acquisition. I have no right to expect that, and must realize that my interests are not necessarily those of all teachers.

I suppose part of the problem is that many insights or theories are only halfway there in practical terms themselves e.g. The Lexical Approach. Reference is made to references, and one can see far from the shoulders of the giants, but that promised land is actually a good day's hike away at least!.

Thank you for bringing a relatively practical sense back to things.

Larry Latham

Actually, Larry, if anyone is being idealistic it is usually me (I fit right into that category type on the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II, and it did seem to me to be a reasonably revealing"test"): my expectations are very high. But ultimately I (can) only (sounds much better than 'only can'!) expect things from myself, and I really do believe that I honestly try not to give my colleagues*, my bosses, and most certainly not my students a hard time in any way (I'm most definitely not always, or even only sometimes, acting like I hate the job and/or students to my colleagues, or locked in debate or argument every minute with them or the boss, or giving my students endless pearls of wisdom - often I'm too busy, no, make that "absorbed in" pondering the language and its possible, rather than just probable, probable, probable ramifications to let silly things like "personality" get in the way of potentially having some fun! ).

Of course, if things and trends don't go my way and help me along in the direction I think I and others should be heading, that's ultimately a little disappointing, but I'm not the one who's going to be changing careers just yet, despite whatever "setbacks" there might be (and I'm most absolutetiest not in it for the fame, power or wealth that it all might bring me, but rather, the riches it might all bring in repaying the students' trust and, well, in a word, that I am using in a way devoid of all negative conntation, "patronage". The students expect us to do a certain job, in a certain way, and if we have said we can do it, there is nothing wrong with being held to our word and agreement in this "patronage" system, and everything wrong with suddenly beginning to say such and such would be better or such and such is "constraining" us - notice in this new rhetoric it's always teacher and student now - from doing our "respective" jobs "properly").

But obviously, I am not saying here that students who want to succeed don't have to motivate themselves just a little and can avoid all responsibility for their learning (especially outside of class!), or that studying e.g. concordances in moderation would not be interesting or useful activity for the students to sometimes do and generally become familiar with (developing self-study, "learner" skills and all that); however, in relation to all this "language" study, I remain convinced of the value of not only students but teachers also owning and making extensive use of those pesky learner dictionaries (obviously inside, but for the students, also outside but generally after a class, and for a teacher - the person who's in the driving seat initially at least - before a class, when they should be FULLY involved in aprincipled process of vocabulary selection and/or fleshing out the grammar (actually, let's scrap the 'and' and 'or' either side of the slash there, and maybe the slash itself in favour of a connecting dash - ah, the joys of "lexicogrammar"!)).

http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej31/m2.html

More soon.

Love,
FH xxx

Just thought I'd post this link to a related thread (where you can find links to more of Cobb's writings):
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 5044#15044

I'm going to try to soon get around to continuing this thread from where I left off last time (and there you all were, holding your breaths! ).